Current techniques to identify alphanumeric characters on license plates on vehicles use a combination of optical character recognition (OCR) software and manual character recognition (MCR). Using the current techniques with a large number of license plates often results in a major portion of the license plate characters needing to be identified by MCR. A significant number of the license plates that are processed by MCR do not result in identifiable license plate characters. Each image processed by MCR that does not result in identifiable license plate characters either does not include a license plate or includes a license plate that has unreadable characters. Therefore, a large number of images that are processed by MCR results in a waste of human effort because the MCR for those images does not identify license plate characters.